For those with an interest in the field of international relations, particularly the reform of the United Nations, Foad Katurai’s new work, Global Governance and the Lesser Peace is to be recommended.

Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í faith, envisaged a gradual progression towards world peace, and encouraged the nation-states of the earth to create a system of global governance that would make war obsolete.

Dr Katurai, a graduate of Columbia and Oxford universities, examines several of the key questions relating to global governance, investigating the trends towards world governance since the First World War, and the questions of reform facing the current United Nations system. He moves on to assess the tasks facing the world community in building a more effective system of global governance, and airs some of the possible issues that might confront a putative World Summit on Global Governance.

In a field of literature that is often dismissed as utopian, Dr Katurai’s pragmatism is refreshing. A senior business consultant by profession, he offers two examples of existing supranational bodies that wield executive power - the International Civil Aviation Organisation  (ICAO) and the European Union (EU). The history of the ICAO’s evolution is a fascinating case study of an institution that traces its descent from a failed earlier attempt to regulate international air travel in the era of the League of Nations.

Today the ICAO has managed to standardise air traffic communications and the rules for airline operations across the entire globe. Clearly there are lessons to be learned from this experience and Dr Katurai notes the ICAO’s ability to transcend the interests of individual states by placing executive control in the hands of aviation specialists.

Dr Katurai’s second case study of the European Union touches on issues more closely related to the questions and concerns that have been raised in global governance studies. The Union offers both positive and negative examples of supra-national governance systems, and the author notes the benefits that have accrued from an incremental approach to the pooling of state sovereignty which has characterised the development of European institutions.

At the same time, Dr Katurai does not shrink from raising serious concerns about the failure of European governments to seek consensus from their people. On both counts, he argues, there is a clear lesson from Europe for those promoting greater global integration to reach beyond national governments and obtain the sanction and support of the people of the world.

Students of global governance may note the absence of references to recent encouraging developments in global policy, such as the creation of the treaty for an International Criminal Court, and the UN Millennium Forum. Mindful of the focus on the incrementalist advances of the European project, some readers may have hoped for Dr Katurai’s analysis of the recent successes of internationalism. From the beginning of the work, however, it is made clear that the author’s intention is to focus on the principles of global governance, and to address some of the questions that arise from those principles.

This is an informative and optimistic book, offering a greater understanding of the twin processes of integration and disruption at work in today’s world. Far from being competing forces, the author scrutinises them from the perspective of the writings of the Bahá'í faith and asserts that the two phenomena are reflections of the same dynamic process which is, for the first time in human history, enhancing the prospect of a successful transition to peaceful and just world.

DW